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The Sinclair family from left to right: Charlene, Fran, Baby, Earl, Robbie, and grandma Ethyl

A cutaway showing the animatronics used to move the faces of the characters -- in this case, Earl Sinclair.

Early Sinclair family concept sketch

Fran with Baby Sinclair.

The three Sinclair children.

Dinosaurs was a half-hour sitcom which aired on ABC. The series, conceived just before Jim Henson's death, focused on a family of dinosaurs, the Sinclairs, and used ground-breaking full body, animatronic puppets.

The show was an effective parody of human life and the American sitcom. Dinosaurs was set in the year 60,000,003 BC. Just a million years earlier, the dinosaurs behaved like animals, eating their offspring and living in swamps. But now they had evolved, raising families, living in houses, working, and paying taxes.

Contents

Origins

News articles written at the time of the premiere highlighted the show's connection to Jim Henson, who had died the year before. "Jim Henson dreamed up the show's basic concept about three years ago," said a New York Times article in April, 1991. "'He wanted it to be a sitcom with a pretty standard structure, with the biggest differences being that it's a family of dinosaurs and their society has this strange toxic life style,' said Brian Henson. But until The Simpsons took off, said Alex Rockwell, a vice president of the Henson organization, 'people thought it was a crazy idea.'" [1] A 1993 article in The New Yorker said that Henson continued to work on a dinosaur project until the "last months of his life." [2]

Henson was working with designer William Stout in the late 80s on a feature film with animatronic dinosaurs, with the working title of The Natural History Project; Henson contacted Stout about the project again in the last months of his life. That project may have been the inspiration for Dinosaurs.

The television division of The Walt Disney Company had begun working on the series in 1990 for CBS, before the series landed on ABC. [3]

Notes

Many of the dinosaur characters' names were based on the names of oil companies (Sinclair, Phillips, Hess, Richfield) or the categories of fuels they produced, like Ethyl. Sinclair Oil in particular is known for its dinosaur mascot.

B.P. Richfield's first and middle initials were inspired by British Petroleum.

Seven episodes of the show were filmed and produced, but did not air in the initial run of the series. They were however included in the syndication package.

In 1993, Michael Jacobs produced a pilot for Fox, referred to as First Family and The Ooog Show, which would have focused on cavemen and essentially continued the same concept as dinosaurs with mammals. Jacobs and Dinosaurs staff writers Tim Doyle and Bob Young wrote the script. The cast included several Dinosaurs alums: Joe Flaherty starred as caveman patriarch Ooog, while guest actors in the pilot included Suzie Plakson as Zsa Zsa and Michelan Sisti as "4th Caveman." The series was not picked up.